The Obama economic "recovery" turned 2 years old in May. Upwards of a trillion dollars spent, for what? The number of people with jobs hasn’t changed, unemployment is far worse than they said it would be if we did nothing, median incomes are down, housing prices are down 10%, and I don’t need to tell you about gas prices. If George W. Bush were President, you just know he’d be personally blamed for this, but Obama gets a pass.

Canada, by the way, has been leading the US out of this mire by reducing debt and spending, even with a socialized medicine albatross around its neck.

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When the minimum wage goes up, low-wage jobs are lost. This isn’t a prediction, it’s an observation. The Wall St. Journal notes it’s happening again, at the worst time for it, and mostly for minorities.

High-speed rail losing speed: "California’s much-vaunted high-speed rail project is, to put it bluntly, a train wreck." Of course, the solution, according to the LA Times, is do it over, throwing good money after bad ($43 billion of bad money).

What a shock! "Autotrader survey shows most motorists go green to ‘save money, not the environment’." Make green energy affordable, and the world will beat a path to your door.

A big reason health care costs are rising so fast is because of central planning (aka Medicare, Medicaid). The Democrats solution? More central planning.

Civility Watch: Wisconsin Attorney General releases 100 pages of threats against lawmakers during the budget battle.

The White House shut out a reporter from the Boston Herald because of a critical editorial that the Herald put on their front page. The issue with Obama is not Fox News; it’s anyone who disagrees with him. But if you didn’t know about this, it’s not your fault. The rest of the media, who you’d think would be all over this treatment of colleagues, were virtually silent on the matter.

The anti-war crowd has seemingly melted away into the woodwork with the election of President Obama. I mean, if George W. Bush had violated federal law by invading a country without, within 60 days, getting congressional approval, how loud would the outcry have been, from the Left and the Media? Instead, a collective yawn.

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Last week was Spring Break for us, but that doesn’t mean I stopped reading the news.

The long arm of “Pastor” Terry Jones. Obama bombs a Muslim country, and all’s quiet, but one nut half a world away burns a Koran, and gets disproportional media coverage for it, and Afghans riot, killing at least a dozen people. Jones may be overreacting, but he’s got nothing on the angry mullahs in Afghanistan. And after all, according to NBC, burning the Koran is worse than burning the Bible because the Bible was written by men, not God. (Where do they get their religion experts?)

Jimmy Carter equates Christianity with Islam in how both religions view women as inferior. Really, Jimmy? I guess if nations that are (or were) historically Christian would do things like, oh, allow women to vote, or hold jobs, or drive, or not have to cover their entire bodies with tents, then perhaps we can revisit this question.

Six out of ten politicians in don’t think you know enough about the issues facing Washington to form a reasonable opinion. More telling to me is that, broken down by party, most Republicans trust you but way more Democrats don’t.

Another example of why it’s hard for government to cut spending (and why conservatives try to hard to hold back increases); Between 400,000 and 500,000 protest against government spending cuts in the UK.

Media Matters becomes a parody of itself, ignoring the media in general and concentrating solely on Fox News. James Taranto wonders:

Does a group that proclaims its purpose to be industrial sabotage qualify [for tax-exempt status]? It’s hard to imagine the answer is yes. Could, say, AT&T set up an organization to sabotage Sprint and do the whole thing free of taxes?

Did you know that opting out of Medicare (not asking for your tax money back, just not taking advantage of it and paying the tab yourself) will cause you to forfeit Social Security? Big, big government, anyone?

Barack Obama was against wars against brutal dictators that did not directly threaten the United State or its interests, before he was for them.

A salute to the men and women of Japan — the Fukushima 50 — who are putting their health and, indeed, lives on the line to bring the reactors under control.

Speaking tearfully through an interpreter by phone, the mother of a 32-year-old worker said: “My son and his colleagues have discussed it at length and they have committed themselves to die if necessary to save the nation.

“He told me they have accepted they will all probably die from radiation sickness in the short term or cancer in the long-term.

Britain’s winter ends tomorrow with further indications of a striking environmental change: snow is starting to disappear from our lives.

Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain’s culture, as warmer winters – which scientists are attributing to global climate change – produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries.

…

However, the warming is so far manifesting itself more in winters which are less cold than in much hotter summers. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.

Winter storms forced British government ministers and bank executives to postpone their meeting Monday on the politically touchy issue of bank bonuses. The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills did not announce a new date but said it hoped the meeting could be rescheduled later this week.

Forecasters have said Britain is experiencing some of the most severe winter weather in a century, with continued freezing temperatures and snowfall accumulations expected Monday afternoon and evening.

I recall a co-worker telling me a story of when he went on a school fieldtrip, in the late 1960s / early 1970s, to a nature preserve. This time was the genesis of the Earth Day movement, and at this particular preserve the school kids were told of the impending doom that awaited mankind. One statement that remained with him was the admonition / prediction that, if they didn’t take care of the earth, then their grandchildren wouldn’t know what a tree was.

As Christians we should be all about cherishing and managing the environment God has not only created, but given to us to take care of. Yet we should never fall into the trap of thinking we have the power or ability to save that environment – the laws of physics simply prove us wrong. Worse still, we should be wary of ever slipping into a modern-day worship of Mother Earth.

The book of Genesis has made clear where and from whom our environment has come.

Keep incidents like this in mind whenever someone advocates that ordinary citizens should have sensible gun-control laws foisted on them, because we can only trust those who have been trained to be responsible with firearms. Incidents like these do not indicate that all law enforcement is bad, but merely that they are human.

The first ‘green’ home in Huntington Beach, debuting to much fanfare a little more than a year ago before having its asking price chopped dramatically and becoming a short sale, has gone back to the bank.

As a liberal Democrat, I worry about the damage we might do by rushing toward a fresh raft of gun-control laws. It’s very hard to demonstrate that most of them — registration, waiting periods, one-gun-a-month laws, closing the gun-show loophole, large-capacity-magazine restrictions, assault-rifle bans — have ever saved a life. It’s a hard thing to accept, but in a country of 350 million privately owned guns, the people who are inclined to do bad things with guns will always be able to get them. One might as well combat air crashes by repealing gravity.

If you didn’t hear anything, or very little, about thousands who attended the March for Life last weekend in DC, that’s understandable. The media routinely ignores it.

And speaking of a liberal media, Jay Carney, who used to write for Time magazine, is now Obama’s new press secretary. His new job description — putting Obama in the most positive light possible — is very much like his old job description.

And still speaking of a liberal media, they’re getting rather disappointed that Obama is not doing what he said he would. Well, they’ve just joined those of us who have been paying attention for 2 years.

Allard’s threat came during a meeting of despondent Democrats in Belknap County on Thursday evening. The meeting was hosted by President Obama’s Organizing for America.

The IPCC said that the glaciers in the Karakoram mountain range would be gone by 2035 due to climate change. The latest word? “Researchers have discovered that contrary to popular belief half of the ice flows in the Karakoram range of the mountains are actually growing rather than shrinking.” Um, who’s popular belief are they talking about?

And finally, a shorter version of the State of the Union speech, from Rick McKee:

In Virginia, the weather also has changed dramatically. Recently arrived residents in the northern suburbs, accustomed to today’s anemic winters, might find it astonishing to learn that there were once ski runs on Ballantrae Hill in McLean, with a rope tow and local ski club. Snow is so scarce today that most Virginia children probably don’t own a sled. But neighbors came to our home at Hickory Hill nearly every winter weekend to ride saucers and Flexible Flyers.

Congratulations to both the Natural Resources Defense Council and the National Ski Areas Association for making a difference. In 2003 the environmental outfit and the trade group teamed up on a campaign called Keep Winter Cool, aimed at "highlighting the impact of global warming on winter recreation and the opportunities both resort operators and their guests have to start solving the problem." They liked the snow and wanted to keep it, but global warming was threatening to turn off the spigots and dry up the slopes. “We can fix the problem”, they said, “as long as we start soon.“

Well, they fixed it. Eight winters later, as Time magazine and the New York Times have reported, global warming is making the weather colder and snowier than ever. Good job, fellas! The Keep Winter Cool campaign seems to have decided to rest on its laurels and call its effort a success; its last press release is dated April 2007. But we thought we should highlight the good work of the NRDC and the NSAA, who were combating global warming before global warming was literally cool.

Estimates vary, but do the math
The country has gotten riled up over a lone madman using a firearm to kill 6 people, somehow coming to the conclusion that we need to implement stricter gun control laws. Consider that if 0.001% (that’s one thousandth of one percent) of the firearm owners in the U.S. decided today to shoot and kill 6 people, we’d have 4,800 people killed. Seems to me that, under current laws, over 99.99% of firearms owners in the U.S. pretty much keep control of their actions.

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Now this is cool
One thing, though… might it be done to our infrastructure as well?

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A longer list this time. I took a vacation from blogging during — if you’ll forgive the expression — Christmas vacation, and this video comes out. Nina Totenberg apologizes for using the term "Christmas party". Is this really a taboo among liberals? Or are liberals in the press really this out of touch with the rest of America?

Here are six good reasons why embryonic stem cells will never make it out of the lab and into the bodies of sick people. But money will still pour into it because, hey, it’s money!

It’s amazing how stark the double standards are regarding leaks. Julian Assange didn’t mind dumping data that is life-or-death to some of our Afghani informers, but hated it when leaks about his own legal troubles came out. Really? And there are other news reporter groups that hate it when they get leaked.

Iran is shipping missiles to Venezuela. Hey Hollywood, this is just fine, right? (Chavez blames all the failures of socialism on others, and so this paranoia is bound to give him cause to use such weapons. So, no, it’s not al right.)

No, the polar bear is not endangered. So says the Obama administration. Really. And Bruce McQuain notes that, really, endangered status is more about power than it is about the environment.

Twenty years ago, and continuing as recently as 2009, it was predicted that global warming would bring much milder winters with less snow because of the temperatures. Ski slopes would be barren and snow would vanish from places as far north as Scotland. Now, however, they’re saying that all that snow we got, even in the deep south, is because of global warming. The link has a good round-up of weather vs predictions.

Why do atheists whine about not being invited to a prayer event? Hey, you don’t like an inauguration that includes a prayer service? Go out and win an election, and run your inauguration any way you want.

As much as I was upset with the espionage perpetrated by WikiLeaks, there has been some interesting information that has come out from it. In addition to the revelation (to some) that the Palestinian situation isn’t the topmost priority for Arab states in the Middle East, and that they recognize sanctions don’t work with Iran, there is also some peek inside climate change horse trading. The Evangelical Ecologist highlights items from Anthony Watts and the Guardian showing that it’s not really all that much about climate. Watts concludes:

What really strikes us is the fact that all this Copenhagen/Cancun stuff has nothing to do with the Climate, or saving the World. It’s about political positioning, money, and plain old fascism cult promotion. But as referred before, this is only the tip of the iceberg. More is to come, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re going to be answered about who is behind Climategate, or Al Gore’s Nobel nomination, or the facts behind all the IPCC mess. Stay tuned…

The EE also notes headlines from The Guardian:

WikiLeaks cables reveal how US manipulated climate accord

Embassy dispatches show America used spying, threats and promises of aid to get support for Copenhagen accord

Go to his page to get these links. The EE is a good read. And then we get his conclusion about all this.

Why am I so thoroughly disgusted about this? Because so many thousands of hardworking folks are out there actually managing habitats and caring for critters and cutting pollution and encouraging creation care, and we who have been following or leading this movement in the Christian Church the past half-decade or so have allowed ourselves to be sidetracked by such a collosal [sic] hoax. And I imagine how many people could have heard the Gospel during this same time if we had put as much time, energy and money into saving souls as we did getting people to cut their "carbon footprint."

Venezuelans are getting tired of the food shortages, the electricity shortages, the soaring crime, the deep recession (i.e. everything that comes part and parcel with socialism) and have started taking back the country, starting with last weekend’s elections. American voters are poised to do the same in November.

The "humanitarian crisis" in Gaza is apparently mostly about symbolism, false narratives and propaganda. Flotillas are required to keep up the narratives.

The United Nations will appoint an Earth contact for aliens. No, really. "Mazlan Othman, the head of the UN’s little-known Office for Outer Space Affairs (Unoosa), is to describe her potential new role next week at a scientific conference at the Royal Society’s Kavli conference centre in Buckinghamshire." Doesn’t it strike anyone as unintentionally humorous that "Unoosa" sounds like some alien specie you’d see on "Star Trek"?

When the Bilderbergers met last June (cue paranoid music), one of the topics they discussed was Global Cooling. No, really. (Al Gore was apparently not invited.) But indeed, global cooling, were it happening, would be worse than global warming. Crops, for starters, kinda’ like the heat.

Tea Partiers uncover rampant voter fraud in Houston. Would it surprise you if I said that most of this was related to a former SEIU employee’s voter registration group? Yeah, me neither.

"Scientists have invented an efficient way to produce apparently safe alternatives to human embryonic stem cells without destroying embryos…." They start with ordinary skin cells. As Glenn Reynolds would say, "Faster, please."

And finally, from Mike Lester, two views of the Constitution. (Click for a larger image.)

Oil-eating bacteria had a feast on the BP Deep-Sea oil spill At Reasons to Believe, on the August 25th podcast, they discussed how ocean bacteria ate up a whole lot of the oil from the BP spill. It is very interesting that this phenomenon was unexpected, considering how much we know about the earth. What? We don’t know everything? Oh… maybe we need to be wary of dire predictions due to Global Warming Climate Change.

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Oops Maybe the bacteria ate mostly gas and not oil. Hmmm… what was that you said about hot summers?

Comments Off on Seven of the most interesting stories on Mon. morning: climate collapse, Moore on Beck, Jim Wallis apologizes, and more

1.Crisis in the Environmental Community: The climate lobby has declined dramatically from its days of high confidence after the 2008 election and it is scrambling to determine the next steps:

A year ago, these groups seemed to be at the peak of their influence, needing only the Senate’s approval for a landmark climate-change bill. But they lost that fight, done in by the sluggish economy and opposition from business and fossil-fuel interests.

It’s taken us a long time to get here, in this plummet from Francis Schaeffer to Glenn Beck. In order to be this gullible, American Christians have had to endure years of vacuous talk about undefined “revival” and “turning America back to God” that was less about anything uniquely Christian than about, at best, a generically theistic civil religion and, at worst, some partisan political movement.

“For days or weeks, every site I went to seemed to be showing me ads for those shoes,” said Ms. Matlin, a mother of two from Montreal. “It is a pretty clever marketing tool. But it’s a little creepy, especially if you don’t know what’s going on.”

“I was wrong, out of anger at the insinuation about the dependence on these foundations, I was wrong to imply that like Beck, Marvin lies for a living,” Wallis said. “Glenn Beck does lie for a living. Marvin Olasky doesn’t lie for a living; that’s not something I should say about a brother in Christ.”

“What he was doing was very important,” State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said of Mr. Faqiryar. “Those charged with pursuing corruption need to continue their work without political interference. It’s something we are watching to make sure the Afghan government lives up to the pledges it has made in battling corruption.”

What’s driving the drop? According to Newsweek, technology and education are particularly nefarious culprits. At home, kids are spending more time watching television and playing video games; at school, our educational system is evaporating the creative juices. Neither of these criticisms is particularly new, but they are informative within the context of the creativity discussion.

McCann capped a stunning comeback with a replay-assisted homer that gave Atlanta a 7-6 victory over the Marlins on Sunday – the first time a game ended on a call using video. Without it, McCann might have only gotten credit for a double and the game would have continued on. Instead, he was jumping into the arms of his teammates after the umps took a second look, taking advantage of a limited replay rule that went into effect two years earlier almost to the day – Aug. 28, 2008 – to make sure they got these sort of calls right.